Stasi, Stasi bo Basi Bonana fanna fo Fasi, Fee fy mo Masi, Stasi!
I sometimes marvel at the performances of members of the Bush Administration on the weekend talk-slash-propaganda shows. Members of Congress, too. They come on, are asked questions, and then spew the party line in a manner that makes it seem we ought to, you know, believe them or something.
Condi Rice's performance in front of the 9/11 Commission was astonishing in the same way. And Rumsfeld's news conferences. Or the infamous press briefings of the recently undearly departed Scott McClellan.
Apparently all you have to do is keep saying what you want to say in the knowledge that no one, after all, will be able to contradict you so long as you never acknowledge you are full of crap.
Until now I could honestly say I'd never seen anything like it, and had to admit that I kind of admired their ability to press their clayey lies down into the mold of truth and almost make them fit.
But I see now that these people were mere wankers. You want to meet some real professionals at this?
I give you Peter Pfutze (left) and Gotthold Schramm two former members of the GDR's secret police, commonly known as "the Stasi".
They've both written books that present the notorious Stasi "as just another intelligence service, along the lines of the CIA or West Germany's BND, but which has been unfairly demonized in the wake of East Germany's collapse".
Audience response at a recent talk by the authors was mixed.
"You're lying!" the man yelled, "That's the biggest load of crap I've ever heard."
Okay, so maybe it wasn't so mixed. (Still, there's no need to be rude! You're worse than the Angry Left!)
The only real problem here, see, is that the Stasi has been misunderstood.
See? You just have to see it from the Stasi's point of view, is all."The prisoners were treated correctly," Pfutze told the audience, some of whom then erupted into sarcastic laughter.
[...] The books' release comes in the wake of another high-profile instance of former Stasi member publicly defending their actions under the former communist regime. In March, some 200 former officers disrupted a meeting at the Hohenschonhausen site, a former Stasi prison in Berlin and now a museum and memorial.
The officers called many of the former victims of the secret service "liars" when they described the terror, abuse and suffering they experienced at the prison.
[...] The book contains accounts of the experiences of 35 former Stasi agents, which the publisher describes as "exciting," "funny" and "enlightening."
LOL! Sounds like Attorney General Gonzalez on "Meet the Press". Or Cheney on "Face the Nation". Or Rumsfeld on the subject of Gitmo.The two authors presented the GDR as a country which respected the rule of law, which operated very normally within the framework of its own constitutional framework.
Ha-ha-ha-ha!
Wait... is that funny?(Brief pause.)
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